Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione: From Padua to Venice

The following is a review of Roger Fry's, "Giovanni Bellini", a study first published in London in 1899. It was republished in New York in 1995 with an introduction by David Alan Brown of Washington's National Gallery. Cited pages are in parenthesis)

Giovanni Bellini: Agony in the Garden

Giovanni Bellini’s “Agony in the Garden” represented a major turning point in his career. In his classic 1899 study, "Giovanni Bellini" Roger Fry asserted that the “Agony and the Garden” marked the transition from Bellini’s early “Paduan” style to the “Venetian” style that would characterize the remainder of his long career.

Although the Bellini family was Venetian, Giovanni’s early work had been done in Padua as an assistant to his father, Jacopo, on their work in a chapel in the Santo, the church dedicated to St. Anthony. Working in the Santo at the same time was Squarcione, the famous teacher who was reputed to have trained over 100 painters including Andrea Mantegna, who would eventually marry into the Bellini family. Squarcione and his school were the leading exponents of what Fry characterized as a distinct Paduan style.

For Fry the “Paduan style” involved a system of linear design that was based on a complexity of outlined forms, and that utilized an old Paduan tempera technique “in which light and shade were put on by small hatched strokes with the point of the brush….” (35) Andrea Mantegna, who never departed from the Paduan style, did a version of the “Agony in the Garden” at about the same time as Giovanni, and Fry argued that the contrast between the two was becoming evident.

Andrea Mantegna: Agony in the Garden

Bellini, in fact, shows in his version of the subject how little the Paduan mannerisms were really congenial to him, for he does not carry their system of linear design consistently throughout the whole picture. The broad unbroken spaces of the hill on which Christ kneels, and of the distant valley, and the more flowing drapery of the S. Peter, all break with the linear convention which he still adopts in the figure of Christ, and to some extent in the hill to the right. (26)

In summary Fry stated that “Bellini shows already that perception of the emotional value of passing effects of atmosphere, which is often supposed to be a peculiarity of the art of this century…he has broken with literal accuracy…”(27)

The change in Bellini’s technique also represented a change in substance and feeling that even moved Giovanni away from his father’s own style. It involved a religious transformation influenced by the preaching of the famed Bernardino of Siena.

The outward change, at all events, from the mundane art of Jacopo’s sketches, which often treated religious subjects with surprising levity, is sufficiently striking. The reaction of Giovanni’s generation was not only towards a new technique, it was a reaction of feeling as well; a revulsion from the premature paganism which had sprung up in the courts of Rimini and Ferrara….it may have received greater impetus from the revivalist propaganda of S. Bernardino. In 1443…S. Bernardino preached the Lenten course at Padua. It was the climax of a lifetime spent in itinerant preaching. He had never before had such an amazing success; and his sermons, preached in the open air, were attended not only by the whole of the population, but by the magistrates representing the sovereign state of Venice, the professors, lecturers, and students of the University. (28)

After his great success in Padua, Bernardino went on to Venice where he received equal acclaim. Fry noted that “he counted among his friends the Doge Foscari, the Blessed Lorenzo Giustiniani, the first patriarch of Venice, and most of the leading senators and distinguished men of the day.”  In Fry’s opinion this visit “may well have been a contributory cause of the more religious attitude to life expressed by Giovanni’s generation.”

It certainly showed a marked influence on Giovanni Bellini and his work. Fry saw the change in Bellini’s famous “Pieta” now in the Brera in Milan.

Giovanni Bellini: Pieta

For here at last Bellini has shaken of the uncongenial intricacy of Paduan design; he has begun to find his own personal scheme, in which form is defined rather by the opposition of broad, scarcely modeled planes, than by multiplicity of contours. (31)

Bellini returned to Venice after 1460 and the following decade marked a “climax” in his life.

At last truly himself, free from all outside influence, he expresses with an intensity which never infringes on the claims of pure beauty, the profoundest sentiment of Christianity, pity, and love….at this period Bellini’s works are confined to two subjects—the Virgin and Child, and the Pieta. (32)

The transition would become complete in 1472 with the arrival of Antonello da Messina in Venice. Antonello brought a new technique “which admitted of a perfect fusion of tones.”

This technique consisted in part in the superposition of thin layers of opaque colour mixed with oils. From this time onward, all the most advanced artists of Venice succeeded in obtaining fusion, and dispensed with hatching, except in rare cases…(35-6)

By the 1480s Bellini had succeeded in the perfection of “that treatment of form as enveloped in atmosphere,” that became one of “the chief distinctions of cinquecento painting in Venice” and which led inexorably to Giorgione.  (41)

The group of pictures we have just considered closed the second stage of Bellini’s artistic career. During this period his aim was to obtain perfectly modulated transitions of tone within a precise contour. In the S. Giobbe altarpiece…a new idea begins to be felt—the conception of enveloping the forms in atmosphere by means of a subtle variation of the quality of the limiting contours of the figures. (43)

S. Giobbe Altarpiece

Reading Fry one is led to conclude that rather than a revolutionary departure from Bellini’s work, the work of Giorgione was based on the principles and technique that Giovanni Bellini had developed over his lifetime. In Fry’s words Giovanni kept alive his father’s tradition that involved “free composition” and “lyrical fancy,” a tradition “of which Giorgione was so soon to find the highest possible expression.”  (47)

In addition, recent studies have shown a close affinity between the techniques used by Giovanni and Giorgione. Fry’s description of Giovanni’s mature style could well apply to Giorgione.

For the atmospheric quality is obtained here largely by the use of oil glazes upon a tempera ground; it is by these that the shimmer of vibrating air is communicated to the whole, by these that the contours, on which the design is still built, are broken down, so that the eye is no longer arrested, as in earlier art, by the impassable barriers they present. (48)

In the first decade of the sixteenth century, at the very height of the Renaissance, Giovanni Bellini, the elderly master who had begun his career in Padua half a century before, and Giorgione, the young master from Castelfranco, were working in Venice. We cannot be sure of their relationship but there certainly seems to have been a close affinity of style. Roger Fry compared Giorgione’s Castelfranco altarpiece with Bellini’s  S. Zaccaria altarpiece.

S. Zaccaria altarpiece

Between this altarpiece, dated 1505, and those of the ninth decade of the previous century, Giorgione’s genius had matured; and the revolution in art, which Bellini had so long prepared, was proclaimed by his Castelfranco Madonna of 1504. In that work Bellini’s great pupil had shown that the new command of atmospheric tone and rich chiaroscuro were consistent with, and even demanded an entirely new simplification of design, and a new feeling for large and spacious disposition of masses. (52)

Giorgione: Castelfranco Altarpiece

Both paintings were done at about the same time but even today it is hard to say who influenced whom. Both are sacred subjects where the traditional “sacra conversazione” has been raised to a new level. ###

Giorgione: Scientific Examinations

In 2004, two famous museums, the Accademia in Venice and the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, worked together to mount a ground-breaking Giorgione exhibition. The Kunsthistorisches agreed to send it’s Giorgione collection that included the “Three Philosophers”, the “Laura”, and the “Boy with an Arrow” to the Accademia. In return the Accademia allowed the Tempest to leave Italy for the first time for the subsequent Viennese showing. 

The exhibition produced a beautiful and valuable catalog with essays and catalog entries by most of the world’s leading Giorgione scholars. In addition, the catalog included two appendices on the scientific or technological examination of some of Giorgione’s works that contained some valuable information that so far has been little noticed.*

The first study, “Giorgione’s Materials and Painting Technique: Scientific Investigation of Three Paintings,” was a joint effort by Elisa Campani, Antonella Casoli, Enrico Fiorin, and Stefano Volpin. The authors examined the newly restored “Castelfranco Altarpiece”, the “Tempest”, and the portrait of an old woman usually called “La Vecchia”. Acknowledging Giorgione’s fame as an innovator, the authors declared that:

The goal of this diagnostic campaign was to determine the extent to which Giorgione’s inventiveness manifested itself in a desire to experiment with new materials and techniques.

Those interested in the very full discussion of the variety of scientific techniques used will have to read the article. In brief, I would just like to highlight some of their results and conclusions. The authors believed that their investigation enabled a “complete reconstruction of Giorgione’s palette in the three masterpieces.” Moreover,

The choice of materials seems to depend on the result which the artist wished to achieve in each work, adapted to his expressive requirements and the evolution of his style. (256)

This conclusion only seems to confirm what everyone has thought of Giorgione and other Venetian painters but it is good to have it confirmed scientifically. Not only does his palette vary significantly but so too does his choice of binding medium. One of the results of the technical examination highlighted,

a significant difference in the painting technique of the three examined works; the choice of egg tempera to apply colour in the Castelfranco altarpiece and of a mixed technique, using walnut oil mixed with egg for La Tempesta and La Vecchia. (260)

The authors draw the following conclusion that so far does not appear to have penetrated the Giorgione world.

Even given the limited number of works investigated, the artist emerges as a figure with a great knowledge of materials and techniques rather than as an innovator and experimenter. One could say that the artistic revolution caused by Giorgione does not necessarily translate into strictly technological innovation. In fact, from this point of view, the analyses have not highlighted any novel resolutions in the three works. Instead there is clear evidence of an ability to utilize the extensive materials available in Venice and of a sound knowledge of the painting techniques accumulated by Venetian workshops during the 15^th century.

Sandra Rossi and Paolo Spezziani collaborated on the second technical essay, “Examination via X-Ray and Infrared Reflectography, and Restoration of the Castelfranco Altarpiece.” Although mainly a discussion of the altarpiece, the authors did report on a  2001 infrared reflectography examination of both the “Tempest” and “La Vecchia” in preparation for the 2004 exhibition. This examinination confirmed a pentimento in the "Tempest" that the catalog still regarded as inexplicable:

 investigation enabled a more precise characterization of the figure on the bridge, who wears a long garment and is seen proceeding to the right. The figure holds a staff in his left hand; on his right shoulder is a second stick, from which hangs a container.

Although this figure cannot be seen even in the infrared image provided in the text, Dr. Rossi confirmed the existence of the man on the bridge to me as we both stood in front of the painting in the Accademia in 2010. A man with a staff and a pilgrim’s sack flung over his shoulder fits no other interpretation of the painting than “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt.” As so many other painters did, both before and after, Giorgione originally must have intended to portray the actual flight in the background with the “Rest” in the foreground. Why he changed his mind, we will never know. ###

Gerard David: "Rest on the Flight into Egypt" with flight in background.
Metropolitan Museum, NY

*Ferino-Pagden, Sylvia, and Nepi-Scire, Giovanna: exh. Cat. Giorgione, Myth and Enigma, Vienna, 2004.

Giorgione's Apprenticeship at Padua?

In my interpretation of Giorgione’s "Tempest" as the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt", I argued that the city in the background represented Judea from where the Holy Family had fled to escape the massace of the Innocents. However, on another level I also agreed with those scholars who have argued that the city in the background of the painting is Padua. On a metaphorical level the city could represent Padua under siege in 1509 during the war of the League of Cambrai. In my paper, I wrote:

There is a faint emblem of Padua's Carrara family on one of the buildings, and the domed building (which could be Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock) could be Padua's Carmine. There is no agreement on a date for the painting, but in the spring of 1509 the forces of the League of Cambrai inflicted a disastrous defeat on Venice at the battle of Agnadello. As a result the Republic lost all of its possessions on the mainland, which it had worked so hard to acquire over the preceding hundred years. Padua, its crown jewel, fell but then was retaken two months later only to be besieged over the summer by the forces of the enemy. Just as in Giorgione's painting storm clouds were raging over Padua, 25 miles in the distance.

Could Giorgione have had first hand knowledge of Padua? Other than the Tempest there is no document linking him with the city, but during his short career, he could easily have traveled by canal to the city with its famed churches and outstanding university. I would like to speculate, and it is only speculation, that Giorgione might have served his apprenticeship in Padua.

Two years ago when my wife and I were in Venice on the occasion of the 500^th anniversary of Giorgione’s death, we took a commuter rail trip to Castelfranco Veneto, Giorgione’s hometown. It was a short easy trip of about one hour by modern rail. But how would Giorgione have gotten from Castelfranco to Venice in the late fifteenth century? I would like to propose a journey that as yet is still only a product of an informed imagination.

The Brenta

Perhaps escorted by some family member, he walked the 14 kilometers to nearby Cittadella, and then boarded a barge downriver on the Brenta. Travel along inland waterways was common. On the way he would have passed the large Contarini estate at Piazzola sul Brenta. The Contarinis were one of the great patrician merchant families in Venice and although the magnificent villa that still exists today was only constructed in 1546, they had taken possession of the huge estate almost a hundred years before. We know that Taddeo Contarini, one of the scions of the family, owned Giorgione’s “Three Philosophers” as well as a lost painting that has been known as the “Discovery of Paris”.

Giorgione: Three Philosophers

A few kilometers downriver Padua would certainly be a likely spot to disembark. The city’s relation to Venice was similar to the relationship of Oxford and Cambridge to London. It has been said that although Venice conquered Padua, Padua and its famed university had conquered Venice. There was no university in Venice but patrician families ordinarily sent their young scholars to Padua to study. I’m not saying that Giorgione studied at the university but I am saying that he was just as likely to apprentice in Padua as in Venice.

Why go to the “Big Apple” of Venice when there was plenty of opportunity for a young man to apprentice in Padua? In mid-century the artist  Squarcione had established his school in Padua. Andrea Mantegna was his most famous pupil and even Giovanni Bellini was influenced by the Paduan style. Padua was also the home of Giotto's work in the famed Scrovegni chapel, a veritable school for many of the great artists of the Renaissance.

Scholars have often assumed that Giorgione apprenticed in the Bellini workshop but in his biography of Giovanni Bellini, Vasari only reported as hearsay that Giorgione served an apprenticeship under Giovanni. In the  biography of Giorgione Vasari only said that the young painter from Castelfranco quickly surpassed the dry and arid style of Giovanni Bellini and his brother, Gentile.

Padua could lay claim to being the home of Venetian humanism but it was also a major artistic center. Below find a list of works seen in Padua by Marcantonio Michiel in the early part of the sixteenth century.*

In the Church called “Chiesa del Santo.”

In the “Chiesa del Santo,” above the main altar, the four bronze figures in high relief surrounding Our Lady, and Our Lady herself, are by Donatello,…(3)

The design for the six figures of saints in the Sacristy were prepared by Francesco Squarcione, though the actual work was executed by the Canozzi….the many pictures executed for this church by that talented Paduan artist (5 note)

The Coronation of Our Lady, a fresco on the first pillar at the left, on entering the church and above the altar of Our Lady, is by Fra Filippo. (7. n.1) (1434) 

 “the altarpiece is by Giacomo Bellini and Giovanni and Gentile, his sons, as shown by the signatures.” (7)

Above the portal of the church the picture representing St. Francis and St. Bernardino kneeling and upholding the monogram of Jesus is by Mantegna, as shown by his signature. [12. n. 3. Early work 1452]

In the School of the Third Order in the churchyard of the Basilica “del Santo—,” Montagna, and Titian painted there… (13)

Note 1. The first floor of this building is decorated with sixteen frescoes, representing the life and miracles of St. Anthony by Montagna, Titian, and Campagnola.

Church of San Francesco

The main altarpiece was made byBartolommeo and Antonio (Vivarini) of Murano, brothers, in 1451, and it contains in the center niche St. Francis;… (16)

In the House of Messer Pietro Bembo.

The small picture on two panels representing on the one side St. John the Baptist dressed, seated, with a lamb, in a landscape; and on the other side, Our Lady with the Child, also in a landscape, was painted by John Memlinc, probably about the year 1470. (21)

Note 2. In the Royal Gallery of Munich, there is a small panel representing St. John, seated, with the lamb, in a landscape, which is ascribed to Memlinc…

The picture, on canvas, representing St. Sebastian, over life size, fastened to a column and shot at with arrows, is by Mantegna. (24)

The two miniatures, on vellum, are by Giulio Campagnola: one represents a woman, nude, lying down with her back turned, and is from a picture by Giorgione:…

*The Anonimo: Notes on Pictures and Works of Art in Italy Made by an Anonymous Writer in the Sixteenth Century, translated by Paolo Mussi, edited by George C. Williamson, London, 1903.

Giorgione's World

After years of gathering dust in my bookshelves I finally read “Once to Sinai”, H.F.M. Prescott’s account of the pilgrimage to the Holy Land undertaken by Friar Felix Fabri, a Dominican brother from Ulm, Germany. Hilda Frances Margaret Prescott is best known for her epic story of the tragic Pilgrimage of Grace in the England of Henry VIII. “Once to Sinai”, however, is an account of a delightful but dangerous pilgrimage recorded by an equally delightful pilgrim who was an assiduous recorder of practically everything he saw of this journey undertaken in 1483.

St. Katherine, Mt. Sinai

Prescott takes up the story in Jerusalem where Fabri and his fellow pilgrims begin the extremely difficult trip through the Sinai desert to the famed monastery of Saint Katherine on Mt. Sinai. The monastery contained the bones of the legendary Queen of Alexandria, and the importance of the journey to Fabri and his fellow pilgrims helps us understand the great popularity of Catherine in the art of the Renaissance. On the journey back we encounter Moslem Cairo and Alexandria; the Greek isles; fabulous Venice; and finally the passage across the Alps back to the beloved monastery in Ulm. 

Many of the details in Renaissance paintings that seem so strange and puzzling to modern eyes were seen and described by friar Fabri. For example, only in our time did John Fleming see the animal in Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert as an Onager or Wild Ass of the desert, and not as the domestic donkey that carried St. Francis to La Verna. On the way back from Mt. Sinai Fabri saw the fabled beast.  

The pilgrims had the good fortune to get a close view of the handsome wild ass of the mountain country, concerning which “naturalists say many things”…(99)

Giovanni Bellini: St. Francis and Onager

Moreover, Fabri actually stayed in the village of Matariya, a virtual resort oasis marking the end of the desert and the entrance to Egypt. In 1483 Christian and Moslem alike still venerated Matariya as the resting place of the Holy Family on the flight into Egypt.

“Like to paradise” the village of Matariya may well have seemed to men fresh from the parched loneliness of the desert, for here rose that famous and holy spring, known to Christians as the well of the Virgin,…whose waters were almost unique among the brackish springs of Egypt. But there was another and more important reason for the fame of Matariya. To Christian and Moslem both, the place was known for its Garden of Balm, the precious product of whose bushes was all the Sultan’s own, and a very considerable asset; while for Christians, and to a lesser degree even for Moslems, the association of both well and garden with the Holy Family during the Flight into Egypt, made the place one of the venerated sites of Egypt. (115)

After the long arduous pilgrimage, Fabri and his companions were finally able to get passage at Alexandria in a Venetian spice convoy. The Captain general of the armada was Sebastian Contarini, “one of the merchant princes of Venice,” a formidable figure who stood high over all. Contarini’s son sailed with him as well as his brother Bernardo, who captained another galley. Even by 1483 the family was wealthy and had already acquired a great estate in the Veneto on the Brenta outside of Padua. In the sixteenth century they would build the magnificent Contarini villa.  A scion of the family, Taddeo Contarini, was an avid art collector who owned Bellini's St. Francis as well as Giorgione's "Three Philosophers".

Contarini Villa

Felix Fabri had great respect for the Venetians and their accomplishments: “the Venetian desire peace, yet daily they prepare for war by land and sea.” The knowledge and the experience of the Captain and his crew brought them through a very hazardous and stormy two-month return voyage to Venice. Fabri remained in Venice for some time and gave a very detailed account of the famed Fondaco dei Tedeschi and its workings. He marveled at the city but had reservations about the decoration of its magnificent churches. He was somewhat taken aback by the mixture of pagan and Christian figures in St. Giovanni e Paolo.

Within the walls were lined with the princely tombs of many Doges, enriched with marble, silver and gold, and a profusion of sculpture. Friar Felix admired but could not approve these monuments. There was in them a lack of theological discrimination; Christ, Our Lady, apostles and martyrs appeared indeed, but surrounded by a mixed company of ancient gods, monsters and heroes….here Hercules appeared,…the hydra was here too,…and, more reprehensibly, naked warriors and boys, so many pagan stories, in fact, mixed up with those of Christianity, that Felix feared lest the ignorant should be confused, and render the honour due to Samson and the Magdalen to Hercules and Venus. (259)

Titian: Venus or Mary Magdalen?

Is it any wonder that today so many scholars now call so many Venetian paintings enigmatic and mysterious?  I have interpreted the two women in Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love” as Mary Magdalen in two guises, but most scholars have seen them as personifications of Venus. It would appear that the ancient figures of pagan legends were just as real during the Renaissance as the figures of Christian scripture and legend. Here is Prescott’s account of tourist Felix Fabri’s exploration of Cyprus, the legendary birthplace of Venus.

Though the friar in registering all this registers disapproval of plebian taste and behaviour, he yet takes pride in adorning his own work with flowers culled from the stories of the ancient gods. …it is in his account of Cyprus that they fill the foreground of his picture, so that the Apostle Paul yields place to the Cytherean, and it almost seems as if this devout, cheerful, Bible-reading celibate has become subject to the enchantment of the Queen of Love herself. Certainly the Friar could never forget that Cyprus was the birthplcace of her who, in the jumble of grotesque tales which he reports, is now the daughter of Saturn, now a mortal, “dead and certainly damned,” yet always the foam-born; though what was dark in the medieval monastic imagination added blood to the foam.She might be  half-devil, but she was still “a most beautiful virgin,” and the Friar could no more ignore than he could approve that creature “of unequalled loviliness.” While in the island he visited the places associated with hername as assiduously as if they were legitimate objects of pilgrimage. From Nicosia he went out all the way to Dali, the old Idalia, where he climbed the solitary hill which “the shameless Venus had made dedicate to herself.” He visited both old and new Paphos: he sat upon the Venus rocks, the great cliffs which thrust themselves out into the glitter of the bright sea near Kouklia. “All these,” he says, “I explored and inspected pretty thoroughly and carefully.” Even in the cathedral of Nicosia he was able to discover a memorial of the wanton goddess…In the Chapel of St. Dominic,…having first studied the frescoes of the Saint’s life around the walls,…Felix turned his attention to a great tomb which stood in the centre of the chapel….The bell was ringing for vespers, and some of the canons were walking up and down in the cathedral waiting for its last note; the Friar approached them and asked for information upon the “incomparable tomb.” The canons obligingly accompanied him and told him “a long and very pleasing story” of how Mars, who figured in it as the injured husband of Venus, in despite of the gryphons which guarded it, had procured this great block of jasper, a stone much conducive to the virtue of chastity, and had presented it to his wife for her bed. “And,” the Friar concludes, “ though I never read that story in any book, nor heard it elsewhere, yet I believe the words and put down what I was told…and if the truth is not as I wrote, yet it is what I heard, and as I heard in innocence, so I have written in innocence, and in innocence it may be read, and without any damage to the faith may be believed by the devout.” 

Fabri saw many wonderful things on his pilgrimage. Despite all he saw of the world of the fabulous East and of Renaissance Venice he was happy to get back to Germany. There was no place like Ulm. ###

H.F.M. Prescott: Once to Sinai, the further pilgrimage of Friar Felix Fabri, NY, 1958. Prescott supplemented her account with reports of travel to the Holy Land as late as the nineteenth century. Not much had changed over the centuries and most of Friar Felix Fabri's observations were verified.

Giorgione's Reputation

In the past two years I have written much about the works of Giorgione and other Renaissance masters but little about Giorgione himself. Last month I provided a background sketch of Venice in the time of Giorgione, and last week I discussed a possible self-portrait in a Budapest Museum.

This week I would like to offer some comments, both old and new, about the painter's reputation. In the Preface to the 2004 Giorgione exhibition catalog Wilfrid Seipel, the Director of Vienna's famed Kunsthistorisches Museum, wrote about Giorgione's reputation among his contemporaries.

Already a few years after his death in 1510 Giorgione was considered one of Venice’s greatest painters and the revolutionary forerunner of the northern style of painting, whose focus was firmly fixed on the structural significance of colour. His intensity of colour, light and mood bewitched nearly all his Venetian contemporaries.*

Vasari devoted only a short biography to Giorgione but ranked the Venetian right up there with the greatest painters of the Renaissance. He placed Giorgione's biography right after Leonardo's and credited him with the creation of the "modern manner."  In the 2004 catalog Sylvia Ferino Pagden, the curator of the Vienna exhibition, noted that Giorgione's fame is just as great in our time.

Today Giorgione is regarded as a unique phenomenon in the history of art: no other Western painter has left so few secure works and enjoyed such fame for almost five hundred years….His legend is fed not only by the mystery that still surrounds him, both as a man and as a painter, but also by the subtle inscrutability he was able to infuse into his paintings. …*

The mystery that surrounds Giorgione stems from the paucity of details about his brief life; difficulties about attribution; and most importantly, questions about interpretation. In his "Lives of the Painters", Vasari called Giorgione a painter of Madonnas, and works like the Castelfranco Altarpiece, and the Allendale Adoration of the Shepherds are well known, but he is not regarded primarily as a painter of “sacred” subjects. However, I claim that his Tempest, “one of the most enigmatic and famous paintings in the world,” is a “sacred” subject": that it is Giorgione’s version of a popular legend, “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt.” In addition, I argue that a lost Giorgione, usually called The Discovery of Paris, also represents an apocryphal episode on the flight into Egypt. If we can view Giorgione through a “sacred” subject lens, then we can see many of his other works in a new light. Added weight would be given to those who regard the Three Philosophers as the Three Magi; the Laura as Mary Magdalen; and the Boy with an Arrow as St. Sebastian. We will even be able to identify the subject of the so-called Three Ages of Man in the Pitti Palace. Finally, seeing Giorgione through a sacred subject lens, has led to an equally startling discovery, an interpretation of Titian’s famous Sacred and Profane Love as The Conversion of Mary Magdalen.

About 100 years ago Edward Hutton waxed enthusiastic about Giorgione in "Venice and Venetia." Although he couldn't see Giorgione as a painter of religious subjects, he felt there was something sacred about the Tempest.

 Undoubtedly the greatest of these is a picture by Georgione, which has passed under various names--the Family of Georgione, or simply the Gipsy and the soldier--and which in itself sums up all that we mean by the Georgionesque in painting. There we see, in a delicious landscape of green and shady valley, of stream and ruin and towered country town, a woman nude but for a cape about her shoulders giving her breast to her child in the shadow of the trees by a quiet stream. On the other side of this jewelled brook a young man like a soldier--or is it a shepherd? --stands  resting on a great lance or crook and seems to converse with her. Close by are the ruins of some classical building overgrown by moss and lichen and half hidden in the trees, and not far off up the stream in the sunset we see the towers and walls and roofs and domes of a little town with its bridge across the stream leading to the great old fortified gate of the place. But what chiefly attracts us in the work is something new we find there, an air of golden reality, something dreamlike too, though and wholly of this our world, an air of music which seems to come to us from the noise of the brook or the summer wind in the trees, or the evening bells that from far-off we seem to hear ring Ave Maria. One of the golden moments of life has been caught here for ever and perfectly expressed. Heaven, it seems, the kingdom of Heaven, is really to be found in our midst, and Giorgione has contrived a miracle the direct opposite of that of Angelico; for he found all the flowers of Tuscany and the byways of the world in far off Paradise, but Georgione has found Paradise itself here in our world. And we must remember that such a work as this was the true invention of Georgione. Before him there was nothing but church pictures. It is to him we owe these pieces which have nothing directly to do with religion, that were painted to light up the rooms we live in, to bring the sun, if you will, into a cabinet and all the sunset and the quiet out-of-doors into a rich man's study. Here, in truth, we have humanism and its essence, and for once perfectly understood and expressed. (p. 122-3). ###

Giorgione: The Tempest

* Giorgione, Myth and Enigma, An Exhibition of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Veneziano, Exhibition catalog ed. By Sylvia Ferino Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Scire, Vienna, 2004.